Wanna Help Self-Driving Cars? Turn on Your Phone's Camera

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Wanna Help Self-Driving Cars? Turn on Your Phone's Camera

Lvl5

If you drive for a living, you’re likely worried about what self-driving technology will do to your livelihood, and for good reason. But if you’re a “can’t-beat-'em-join'-em” type, and figure you might as well make a few bucks helping ease the inevitable into existence, just download Payver. It's an app that pays you a few pennies for every mile you drive, if you’re willing to point your phone’s camera at the road and share what it records.

Payver is the work of Lvl5, a new startup focused on building the maps self-driving cars will need to navigate safely. Detailed, digital maps are widely considered an essential addition to the sensors these vehicles carry, an extra source of information to complement the cameras, radars, and lidars scanning the road. If the car at least knows the basic lay of the land, the thinking goes, handling real time obstacles gets easier.

The problem is, those maps need a level of detail that goes way beyond what you’ll find on any phone screen or atlas: Not just street names and which roads are one-way, but the exact location of every stop sign, traffic light, lane line, and curb, down to the centimeter.

Lvl5

Lvl5 was founded last year by three engineers—two Tesla Autopilot veterans, one formerly of iRobot—who think they can make charting the world easy by crowdsourcing data from the countless camera phones already in cars. Payver is the first step in their plan: Anyone can download the app, point the camera out the windshield, and get paid between one and five cents for every mile they drive (you get more for roads other drivers haven’t hit yet). The camera’s feed gets uploaded to Lvl5’s central hub (via Wi-Fi by default), where the startup’s software picks out key features—traffic lights, lane lines, stop signs—and builds the map. No expensive lidar, or dedicated drivers needed. Each subsequent user to drive that same stretch either confirms the details or provides updates: Here there be a new pothole.

Many of the companies developing autonomous tech have built their own maps by sending out fleets of camera- and lidar-equipped vehicles to scan the environment in advance. That works fine for testing purposes, but it’s hard to scale to larger areas, especially since these maps will need to be updated frequently—like every few days—because they’re no good if they’re giving robots bad data.

In just 3 months, 500,000 miles of U.S. roadway have been covered with Payver.

Lvl5

Payver’s the short-term play, Lvl5’s way of bootstrapping together a map before it has buy-in from any of the serious players in this space, to prove what it can do. But now the company is running pilot projects with a few automakers (whom Kouri declined to name), and expects that once it has official partnerships in place, it can use those companies’ vehicles’ built-in cameras to collect way more data, without worrying about onboarding and paying individual drivers.

“It’s a totally logical strategy,” says John Ristevski, who ran the autonomous car mapping division at Here, which BMW, Audi, and Daimler jointly bought from Nokia last year. “Everyone’s thinking about crowdsourcing in some form.” It’s the natural way to continuously gather data from all over the country, even the world.

Tesla uses exactly that type of fleet learning in its Autopilot equipped vehicles. New owners get an onscreen message: "We need to collect short video clips using the car’s external cameras to learn how to recognize things like lane lines, street signs, and traffic light positions. The more fleet learning of road conditions we are able to do, the better your Tesla’s self-driving ability will become."

The question for Lvl5 will be whether it can get enough drivers, in enough places, onto the Payver app to build a set of maps good enough to win over any of the companies who’ll need those cartography skills for their self-driving ambitions. Over the past few months, Kouri says, the company has recruited 2,500 drivers, who have covered 90 percent of US highways. Depending on the quality of those maps, Ristevski says, that’s a good start. But there’s a lot of world to record.

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